Art Review: Le Gun - 'The Family'

You presumably already know about the collective of illustrators that is Le Gun, and their superb book/magazine of illustrations, and other artistic goings on. Well, this time they've put on a show.

A queue? A bloody great big queue greets us as we try and enter the show, hidden away on Arnold Circus behind Shoreditch Church, like a lost location in a children's book. Thankfully the queue is only for the bar, and we move through the first room: a place of mirrors, stuffed animal heads (one even with a fag nonchalantly hanging from its mouth), and the bar. Into a completely cardboard thirtieseque drawing room. Yes, thats right everything is cardboard and marker pen. Lightfittings, paintings on the wall, books on the bookshelf. There is even a cardboard piano in the corner. After marvelling at this, we passed through a decidedly Alice In Wonderland-like small door into the next space.

A space consisting of a huge mural running from one side of the room, right round to the other. It starts at an underground station (zone 7, and interzone only, of course) and moving through the sea-side, then sea through north Africa adorned with decidedly interwar scenes of decadence. At the end of this is more conventionally framed illustrations, albeit mostly conventional in frame only.

This really is such a superb conversion of the aesthetic of the already excellent Le Gun into a more 3D exhibition/installation, we fear that we shall be gushing about it in the manner of an excited 6th former for months to come. If you miss it, you'll only read about it in years to come and kick yourself that you didn't go.